


They're Mirroring the Dancing

by MooseFeels



Series: Kept [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fairy Tale Elements, Former Slave, Mentions of Prostitution, Mentions of Slavery, Mentions of non-con, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, former prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-18
Packaged: 2018-01-01 07:02:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MooseFeels/pseuds/MooseFeels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean interrupts the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dean laughs suddenly, bitterly. The sound rings through the night air and Castiel gasps. There is something trance-like in storytelling, and he fell into it. Now, though, he is out and he is aware of how cold the night is around him and the sound of Dean’s laughter.

There is something strange to it. Not quite...not laughing at Castiel, laughing at something else. Something broken.

“Pardon?” Castiel asks, more out of habit than anything.

Dean stops laughing and says, “Sorry, I forgot. I forget things. Don’t worry about it.”

Castiel frowns, but throws any thought on it from his mind.

Dean has his own business.

Castiel looks at the remnant of the chain at his foot. He remembers when they put this one on him, or at least, he remembers waking up with it. He remembers the heavy, drugged feeling the morning after and the leaden quality of his foot. Now it is gone, now the chain is gone, but the cuff remains. Impotent to tie to him to anything.

“Can we remove this?” he asks.

“There should be someone who can take care of it for you,” he says. “We’ll head back toward the city tomorrow.”

“Why can’t we sleep there now?” Castiel asks.

There is a pause. Pregnant. “Victory came at a terrible cost,” he answers. “You can watch, if you’d like.”

Castiel looks from where Dean sits back to the city, where something strange begins to happen, where there begins a terrible glow.

Something golden and strange winds from the ground up through the streets, something that looks like thread or a serpent.

“What is it?” Castiel asks.

“Alistair,” Dean answers. “The wyrm.”

The glow spreads suddenly, and then there is great fire.

Castiel watches, horrified, a little longer and then he turns away. Looks at Dean’s great cloak, at the expanse of fabric where he should have a face. He looks away and at the dying fire in front of himself instead.

“Are you sure you don’t want the tent?” he asks.

Castiel nods. He looks up. “I’ve never seen so much of the sky at once before,” he says. “I’m not done looking at it. You should go ahead and rest, if you are ready.”

Dean sighs and nods. “Don’t be awake all night. We need to ride for shade in the morning and find you some shoes. See about that chain, too.”

“Sleep well,” he murmurs. “Go in peace.”

Dean grunts in response as he stands. He climbs into the low burlap tent and tosses a couple of blankets out for Castiel.

Castiel curls as close to the fire as he dares, and he falls asleep watching the constellations, a free man.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Castiel wakes up to the sound of screaming coming from the text about four hours later, just as the deepest part of the darkness has fallen, the fire has gone out, and whatever it is that haunts the city has died down. He sits up and looks from the loose nest of cloak and blanket he has been curled in to look at the tent. Horrified and concerned.

The scream is not like one he has heard before, and Castiel knows screams intimately. This is more than pain or rage or fear- this is some deeper dance of all three of them. This is something unspeakable, something cursed and dark.

It rings in the night and echoes in Castiel’s ears. Painful.

He looks at the phantom shape of the tent in the low moonlight for a long time, barely discernable from the other dark shapes all around him.

He shivers, briefly, and curls back down into the blankets.

He wonders what kind of man asks for a story about pain.

* * *

 

 

He wakes up with Dean’s boot at his shoulder.

“Get up,” he grumbles. “Don’t head out soon, we’ll burn alive.”

It’s nearly dawn, the lowlight of pre-morning all around. The tent is already packed and the horse is ready to go. Castiel yawns and rolls up the blanket and re-adjusts his long, blue cloak, which trails past his knees and is wrapped easily over his face, obscuring everything but his eyes, which he knows are blue. All of the men at the house told him so.

He yawns a little and asks, “Did you sleep well?”

Dean snorts. Shakes his head. “Get on the horse,” he says. “We need to find shade. And shoes for you.”

Castiel climbs on, and they ride back toward the city.

The buildings still stand, and the objects in them do, too. It’s empty, though. No people, no animals, no birds, no insects. Nothing at all, just the thunderous sound of the horse hooves on the streets.

They finally stop in front of a building and Dean says, “Will this do?”

Castiel looks at it for a long time and says, “I don’t know.”

Dean sighs heavily and dismounts. Castiel follows him, but Dean carries him. There is broken glass in the streets, and it crunches under Dean’s fine boots.

The building- the shop, Castiel supposes- is empty. Dean surveys the floor and puts Castiel down.

“To the back,” he says. “There should be a few pair in there, or at least a left and a right of something.”

Castiel can’t help but look around, though, entranced. There are floor models, all too small to fit on real feet. Intricately worked and made, done in lush materials with fine embroidery. There are leather boots that would fit a small child, dark green with tiny brass buttons.

“Stop looking at the floor models,” Dean calls from the back. “We need to find something that fits you.”

Castiel parts the curtain that divides the workshop from the floor and peers around. There are tools- hobnails and molds and knives and presses. There’s the strange smell of new leather and something acrid, too. It makes Castiel think of the tanners who would come in the spring, a winter of furs and skins financing their lay. The odor of them and the way it wanted to cling to him for days afterward.

They’re looking, and then Castiel gasps.

The boots are lower than Dean’s are and a little smaller, too. Castiel holds his breath for a long moment as he slips them on and releases it when he realizes they fit.

They’re a dusky, dark blue. Lacing down the front and pressed into the leather on the sides, broad wings, just wide enough to wrap over his ankle and up his calf a little. They’re fine boots. Beautiful boots.

“You find something?” Dean asks.

Castiel looks up at him, and he notices that Dean has re-wrapped his cloak differently, so that all of his face is obscured but his eyes, which show out bright green and new. Brown-blonde brows show up over the eyes.

He looks down at Castiel’s feet and nods. “Come on,” he says. “I don’t like this place.”

Dean helps him lace and tie his boots, which are firm and smooth over his feet. Novel and new.

“I think I had shoes when I was child,” Castiel muses softly. “I think...I think we were farmers. I think I had to have them, to walk out- to walk out to the beach? Maybe fishermen.” He shakes his head. It was so long ago.

They climb back onto the horse and Dean turns a few times in the street. “We can leave the city,” he says. “We can ride in any direction, head for the sea or the mountains or the forest. Even through the desert to the places on the other side. But we can never come back here.”

Castiel looks at the shop where he found his shoes. He looks across from it, at the empty building with broken windows. He looks at the street. He looks up the empty space and sees the white palace like a great, untoppled domino on the horizon.

He imagines never seeing it again.

“Okay,” he says.

They ride off.

* * *

 

 

As they’re setting up camp that evening, Castiel looks at Dean’s hands trying to make the fire and says, “Why?”

Dean keeps working, but he replies, “Excuse me?”

“Why?” Castiel asks. “Why did you come to the house? Why did you unchain me? Why are we riding together? Why?”

Dean stops and he looks up at Castiel. Only his eyes visible. “They told me the whole city had died,” he answers. “Everyone.” He pauses and points at Castiel. The setting sun casts a long shadow that stabs into Castiel’s cloaked chest. “I don’t know why you’re alive, or why that boy was alive. If he’d hung around, I would have taken him, too. But there’s you.”  
He goes back to building the fire.

Castiel doesn’t ask him how he knew to go to the house. He just wraps his cloak a little tighter about himself and begins, “The traveler looked at the prince and said…”

 


End file.
